Poet Stanley Kunitz at 100

Note: Book excerpts are provided by the publisher and may contain language some find offensive.

Excerpt: The Collected Poems

January 1, 201012:00 AM ET

Chapter One

An Old Cracked Tune

My name is Solomon Levi, the desert is my home, my mother's breast was thorny, and father I had none.

The sands whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard. I dance, for the joy of surviving, on the edge of the road.

The Layers

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose from its mooring, under the screaking of the gulls, he tried at first to wave to his dear ones on shore, but in the rolling fog they had already lost their faces. Too tired even to choose between jumping and calling, somehow he felt absolved and free of his burdens, those mottoes stamped on his name-tag: conscience, ambition, and all that caring. He was content to lie down with the family ghosts in the slop of his cradle, buffeted by the storm, endlessly drifting. Peace! Peace! To be rocked by the Infinite! As if it didn't matter which way was home; as if he didn't know he loved the earth so much he wanted to stay forever.

Halley's Comet

Miss Murphy in first grade wrote its name in chalk across the board and told us it was roaring down the stormtracks of the Milky Way at frightful speed and if it wandered off its course and smashed into the earth there'd be no school tomorrow. A red-bearded preacher from the hills with a wild look in his eyes stood in the public square at the playground's edge proclaiming he was sent by God to save every one of us, even the little children. "Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted, waving his hand-lettered sign. At supper I felt sad to think that it was probably the last meal I'd share with my mother and my sisters; but I felt excited too and scarcely touched my plate. So mother scolded me and sent me early to my room. The whole family's asleep except for me. They never heard me steal into the stairwell hall and climb the ladder to the fresh night air. Look for me, Father, on the roof of the red brick building at the foot of Green Street that's where we live, you know, on the top floor. I'm the boy in the white flannel gown sprawled on this coarse gravel bed searching the starry sky, waiting for the world to end.

Hornworm: Summer Reverie

Here in caterpillar country I learned how to survive by pretending to be a dragon. See me put on that look of slow and fierce surprise when I lift my bulbous head and glare at an intruder. Nobody seems to guess how gentle I really am, content most of the time simply to disappear by melting into the scenery. Smooth and fatty and long, with seven white stripes painted on either side and a sharp little horn for a tail, I lie stretched out on a leaf, pale green on my bed of green, munching, munching.